Threads of the Self: An affective account of academic work

Abstract

This hybrid poetic-reflective piece explores the affective textures of academic work and the search for meaningfulness within university life. Combining a framing text with a poem, it examines how academic work is lived through the entanglement of multiple selves that move across professional and personal domains. Rather than treating work as bounded within formal roles, outputs, or institutional metrics, the piece attends to quieter dimensions of organizational life: attentiveness, relationality, emotional labor, and the ongoing search for coherence within conditions of productivity and performance.

Drawing on conversations in organization studies around affect, sensemaking, and care, the poem does not seek to explain organizational life analytically, but to remain close to its lived textures. Poetic form is used not simply as a representation, but as a practice of attentiveness to ambiguity, multiplicity, and embodied experience. While grounded in academic labor, the concerns explored extend more broadly to questions of meaning, identity, and affect across organizational settings.